Adobe Director Basics

ADOBE DIRECTOR BASICS
3D: Controlling action
Rear-view mirror
You can use a very similar technique to create a rear-view mirror for a racing game. Simply create a secondary camera,
add it to the sprite, and set it as a child of the user's vehicle, pointing backwards. To get a wide enough view for the
rear-view mirror to be useful, you may wish to set the camera's projectionAngle property to a fairly large angle.
Making the camera move naturally
Your target audience is used to the camera movements used in the film industry. In the film industry, cameras are
heavy and cannot be accelerated quickly. In a virtual world, a camera has no weight, so you can move it instantaneously
from one point to another. However, your audience may see such movement as unnatural.
Both the avatar that you are following and the camera must start moving slowly, and increase in speed. If the avatar
accelerates quickly, it looks more natural if the camera lags behind initially, and then catches up when the avatar has
reached its top speed.
Instead of making the third-party camera follow at a fixed distance, you can vary the distance based on the changing
speed of the avatar. One simple way to do this is to use the interpolate() and interpolateTo() methods.
To see an example of the use of interpolateTo() to make the camera move more smoothly, download and launch
the movie ElasticCamera.dir.
Using interpolateTo() gives a natural lag between the movement of the avatar and the movement of the camera
You can find more details on this technique at “Interpolation” on page 264.
You can see an example of the transform.interpolate() method in the demo movie for “Moving to a given
location” on page 225. In this example, a click on the Ground model will make the camera accelerate then decelerate
as it arrives at its target position.
Other ideas
When navigating with the keyboard, you may prefer to ramp up to a maximum speed, and then continue to cruise at
that speed, and finally ramp down to a halt when the user releases the mouse.
With a third-person view, you can associate each of these stages with a different motion for the avatar. The avatar can
start with an “Idle” motion, then adopt an “Idle to walk” motion, then continue with a “Walk” motion. When the user
releases the movement key, the avatar can adopt a “Walk to Idle” motion, and then return to “Idle”. Each motion can
be designed to move seamlessly into the next one.
See “Pre-defined animations” on page 270 for more details.
Last updated 8/26/2011
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